This article revisits a seminal figure of film history, the director/actor/scriptwriter Erich von Stroheim, focusing on his early work, and arguing that a Gothic framework is the most appropriate context for making sense of his complex, subversive persona; equally, the essay shows how two films dealing with urban, sophisticated characters, set in modern locations such as Monte Carlo, are in fact drenched in Gothic sensibility and aesthetics. As the director and star of Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922), the Austrian-born Erich von Stroheim has so far been analysed as a catalyst for post-WWI stereotypes of unwelcome foreignness in the USA. Irrupting in a context fraught with anxieties about “evil Huns”, immigration, and ambivalent notions of Europeanness, Stroheim’s films caused both outrage and admiration. While film scholars have read Stroheim’s perceived transgression through his symbolic role of Germanic alien, they have paid scant attention to the films themselves. This omission has effectively ignored other powerful evocations emerging from Stroheim’s work, and the way its suggestions of contemporary identities are subsumed into a much wider, richer narrative: a Gothic narrative. Equally, scholars have correctly mobilized, yet not fully addressed, the essential contradiction at the basis of Stroheim’s roles: their inexplicable quality of repulsion-attraction, or in other words, Gothic abjection. This article acknowledges the films’ linkability to post-WWI xenophobia, yet argues that their subversive aspects lie in a Gothic system of signification, allowing for yet vastly exceeding cultural and national references of the period; the Gothic also provides a framework where the unresolved tensions of Stroheim’s work can meaningfully coexist. Blind Husbands and Foolish Wives centre on a staple Gothic figure, the aberrant male seducer, a “satanic” protagonist who is both molester and object of erotic desire, irresistible yet repulsive. Visually and narratively reliant on Gothic tropes, from “sublimely horrible” mise-en-scene to intimations of rape and sadism, the films daringly validate not the merely objectionable, but the abject, embodied in Erich von Stroheim’s perverse masculinity.
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机译：本文回顾了电影史上的开创性人物，导演/演员/编剧埃里希·冯·斯特罗海姆（Erich von Stroheim），着重于他的早期作品，并认为哥特式框架是最能理解其复杂的颠覆性人物形象的背景。同样，这篇文章还展示了如何在现代场景（如蒙特卡洛）中拍摄两部涉及都市，精致人物的电影，实际上是如何浸透哥特式的感性和美学。作为盲人丈夫（1919）和愚蠢妻子（1922）的导演和明星，迄今为止，出生于奥地利的埃里希·冯·斯特罗海姆（Erich von Stroheim）被分析为美国第一次世界大战后不受欢迎的外国定型观念的催化剂。斯特罗海姆（Stroheim）的电影在充满对“邪恶的匈奴”，移民和对欧洲性的含混观念的焦虑中奔波，引起了愤怒和钦佩。尽管电影学者通过他的日耳曼外星人的象征角色来阅读斯特罗海姆的过错，但他们却很少关注电影本身。这种疏忽实际上忽略了斯特罗海姆作品中出现的其他强有力的唤起作用，其关于当代身份的建议被包含在一个更广泛，更丰富的叙述中：一个哥特式叙述。同样，学者们已经正确地动员了但没有充分解决基于斯特罗海姆角色的基本矛盾：他们难以理解的排斥力质量，或者说是哥特式的排斥。本文承认了电影与第一次世界大战后的仇外心理的联系，但认为电影的颠覆性在于哥特式的意味系统，从而大大超过了这一时期的文化和民族参考。哥特式小说还提供了一个框架，在这个框架中，未解决的斯特罗海姆作品的紧张局势可以有意义地共存。盲人丈夫和愚蠢的妻子以哥特式的主要人物为中心，这个异常的男性诱惑者是一个“撒旦”主角，既是性骚扰者又是性欲的对象，不可抗拒却令人反感。从“极其恐怖的”电影场景到强奸和虐待狂的暗示，这些视觉上和叙事上的内容都依赖于哥特式的格言，这些电影不仅勇敢地证明了埃里希·冯·斯特罗海姆（Erich von Stroheim）不正当的男性气概中所表现出来的不仅令人反感，而且令人反感。
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